TIMELESS follows Shannon as three native men find her and escort her to a mountain man's cabin. John Cutler tells her that she is in 1656 and feeds her cornbread. Of course, he believes she's delirious after hitting her head. Kahnawakee is the leader of the local tribe and for no reason at all Shannon considers that this man will come back for her and marry her. The rough trapper seems more threatening than he is, and Shannon takes some time to get comfortable around him, but he doesn't do her any harm. He's highly amused at the thought of a woman voting, or being a lawyer, but he's more preoccupied with his wish to marry Kahnawakee's sister.

The Susquehannock village is heavily fortified, as they occasionally war with other tribes, and centres around longhouses. Shannon must have been incredibly naive as she didn't realise that the local people depended upon felling trees and killing animals. Nor did it occur to her that the tribe's leader would be married. John Cutler finds her very attractive, but desires marrying into the tribe more than anything. Shannon has a dilemma however, which goes beyond her growing admiration for John: she knows what nobody else does, that the tribe will die out in a few short years. Can she warn any of them, and is it right to change history?

I found Shannon overly idealistic and slow to adapt, but she did not seem to have read any science fiction, which would have set her on the right track for time travel: blend in. She thinks that it would be marvelous to live three hundred years in her past; when most people were dead by their fifties, most women died in childbirth and most children died before the age of four, and bad teeth were a painful fact of life. Is anyone that poorly read? When she visits New Amsterdam her mind is wholly occupied with dresses rather than with the level of technology in use. John also thinks this girl is ideally suited to his backwoods life, despite the fact that she doesn't do one useful thing with an axe or a pelt and can't cook stew.

Culture clash is a staple of time travel stories, but in Kate Donovan's story we have an alternate culture with the city dwellers as well as native tribes. Read TIMELESS for an interesting contrast in history, or just for the romance element, which does leave us with the intriguing challenge of how a girl out of time can be happy with one man.

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